"I had, also, during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raised against my views which I had not at least noticed and attempted to answer."
"To my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading."
"I discovered, though unconsciously and insensibly, that the pleasure of observing and reasoning was a much higher one than that of skill and sport. The primeval instincts of the barbarian slowly yielded to the acquired tastes of the civilized man."
"I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable."
The latter quote is what Darwin (1809-1882) wrote to the botanist Joseph Hooker in 1844, describing what it felt like to have become convinced that species are not fixed. He had the central idea — natural selection, descent with modification — essentially in hand, and he reacted not by rushing to announce it, even if half-baked, as many ILE scientists do, but by confessing it guiltily to one trusted correspondent and then sitting on it for another fifteen years. His temperament, as this shows, was contemplative, inward, slow to act, and oriented toward something he experienced as dark and dangerous rather than thrilling.
The traditional socionics (both Aushra and WSS, likely some others, too) typing for Darwin is ILI, although LII is not quite implausible. At the clear ends you can tell them apart — the selfless idealist LII, the cynical pragmatist ILI — but a great many introverted intuitive-logical people are not recognizably one or the other. ILI and LII, after all, the closest "quasis" in their general worldview, and while I have enough respect for classical Socionics to avoid typing people like that, sometimes it's unavoidable, even if it can seem like a cop-out and is quite uncomfortable for the dualization theory. But quardral values are not the only ones out there — even by descriptions, you can see that, e.g. all NT types, all EP types etc. also share some "values" of their own!
The best argument for ILI is the sort of imagination that natural selection needed. The theory rests on the "dynamic" apprehension of gradual metamorphosis across time: the ability to see, vividly, a population splitting into different groups and a limb slowly transforming into a wing—tiny changes building up over huge amounts of time. This "time vision," understanding slow processes and their trajectories, is key to the theory. Darwin clearly was proficient in, and enjoyed, thinking in terms of geological time to fully grasp how forms evolve across it.
Also typically for ILI, Darwin had a certain consistent, albeit low-key, fascination with death, decay, and the unpleasant underside of life (ILI being one of the four death-contemplators, alongside IEI, EIE and EII). His theory's actual mechanism is death — differential mortality, the ceaseless culling, "the war of nature, from famine and death," as the Origin puts it in its closing pages. An ILI can look directly at that engine of universal struggle and find in it a certain serenity and even pleasure. One of his last books is a loving study of how earthworms slowly consume the dead and remake the soil — mortality and gradual dissolution turned into a research program. And the intrusive "horrid spectacle" thoughts that haunted his nights "with vivid and most wearing repetition," along with the obsessive six-year health-diary in which he scored each bad night, read in this light less as simple hypochondria than as the morbid-leaning inner weather characteristic of the type. The man who could dispassionately contemplate death as mechanism without flinching was also visited by its darker images.
Darwin had the whole thing essentially sketched in 1844 and simply did not move to publish it, and was finally forced off the contemplative perch only when Wallace's letter arrived in 1858 with the same idea and made delay impossible. That is the profile of the person of "passive reflection rather than lively active action", as Talanov puts it.
The Origin of Species is, by Darwin's own description, "one long argument", and indeed, it's an inductive logical edifice, marshaling everything possible — biogeography, embryology, morphology, the fossil record, and domestic breeding into a single cumulative demonstration of a general explanatory law, and this is more LII territory, since it's the type that combines diverse sources to discover previously unknown global laws (and it's not uncommon for the type to consider discoverting this the main social mission in life). Furthermore, Darwin was not a totally cynical pragmatist of "evil ILI" fame. He also disliked viewing "operating theaters" where surgeons publically operated on people, confessing that "I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year." At least, in Talanovism, that's a fairly strong LII-vs-ILI sign, even if it has the tendency to "villanize" ILI. His fascination with morbid stuff never went that far. A "100%" ILI is supposed to have the harder stomach for it (which is the trait that, pushed to its caricature, becomes the "cynical/cold ILI" spider-in-his-lair villain).
And of course, both types are, in theory, strong in both Ti and Ni. In fact, the "Ni-Ti" type of ambiguous ir/rationality, prominent on the Internet, doesn't really have a canonical Socionics counterpart, although ILI is on occasion is described as more Ni-Ti than Ni-Te. From most to least plausible and depending on the strength of other functions, the possible closest socionical types of such a combination are ILI, LII, IEI, LSI, ILE.
Darwin's gradual adoption of atheistic views (ininially believing in a Creator/First Cause, but then gradually losing it) also fits both types. He kept it largely private, and described the loss as creeping in "at a very slow rate, but was at last complete" — no drastic conversion moment, just the gradual decision under the weight of the old structure not cohering anymore. His theory removed a previously powerful theistic argument-by-design, and his was also greatly moved by an argument from suffering.
"There is grandeur in this view of life... whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
The closing sentence of the Origin combines both motifs. "From so simple a beginning... have been, and are being, evolved" — the long unfolding through time, forms becoming across the ages — is the ILI's vision. "According to the fixed law" — the single general principle beneath the endless particulars — is the LII's. Let's give the formal priority here to ILI by tradition and, I think, by the weight of the imagination and the temperament, albeit with LII also plausible and very close behind.
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